Mutual Understanding
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Goh and Taki adjust to life after the honeymoon. Tsunuga offers advice.


**Title:** Mutual Understanding  
**Universe:** Yellow  
**Theme/Topic:** N/A  
**Rating:** PG  
**Character/Pairing/s:** GohxTaki, Tsunuga  
**Warnings/Spoilers:** Implied spoilers through the end of series.  
**Word Count: **1,603  
**Summary:** Goh and Taki adjust to life after the honeymoon. Tsunuga offers advice.  
**Dedication:** Gryvon- here is your yuletide fic! I've never written Yellow before so I hope it is to your tastes, even if it is kind of silly.  
**A/N:** I worry about OOC and stupidity of course, since I am more aligned towards comedy than drama and Yellow wasn't a very funny series all around. But hopefully this won't seem too off the wall!  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine, though I wish constantly.  
**Distribution:** Just lemme know.

* * *

"What did you do this time?" Tsunuga asked the minute he walked through the door, and casually poured Goh a cup of coffee in an attempt to hold back his amusement (or at least distract himself from it).

It failed miserably.

"I didn't do anything!" the younger man assured him with a huff, taking a seat at the counter and slouching in an impressive display of bad mood. He didn't even move to thank the older man for the coffee.

Tsunuga raised an eyebrow. "You want ice?"

"No."

"It'll take the swelling down."

Goh sighed, looking vaguely self-conscious at the reminder of the impressive puffy bruise on his otherwise flawless face. "Fine. Thanks."

Tsunuga moved to get him ice, packing it into a clean hand towel and tying the top off neatly before handing it to Goh. "You had to have done something, to have Taki give you a shiner like that," he whistled. And then grinned. "Guess the honeymoon's over then, eh?"

Goh winced at the reminder. "The hell it is. Besides… it wasn't anything I _did_…" he began, then paused and sighed, "…recently. Kind of." He gingerly put the ice pack over it, hissing a bit through his teeth at the contact. "For such a cute guy, the asshole really packs a punch when he wants to."

Tsunuga snorted. "Clearly. So what did you _kind of_ do?"

Goh ran a hand through his hair, and somehow managed to still make it look appropriately glamorous despite the mess that was his left eye. "He is… coming to terms with his newfound bisexuality," the dark-haired agent explained, and didn't want to get into any more details beyond that.

Tsunuga studied him for a while.

And then, "You did something to him in public again, didn't you?"

"No!" Cough. "Er…maybe a little. But that wasn't my fault."

A beat.

"You… grabbed him in public by _accident_?"

"Well no. It wasn't an _accident_," Goh admitted, looking vaguely embarrassed. "But I'm telling you, it wasn't my fault. There was this _girl, _and you know…"

"Oh," Tsunuga supplied, and thought he knew where this was going.

"Right! I forget how much of a _player_ he used to be. Sort of. You know what I'm saying." Goh paused on the older man's pointed look. "Okay, not that I'm saying I'm much _better_, but at least the guys _I _slept with before don't come up to me in the middle of the day and drape themselves all over me and… what?"

Tsunuga's pointed look turned even more pointed.

"Kei does not even count!"

Tsunuga began wiping down some glasses—this probably was going to take longer than he'd initially anticipated. "Uh huh."

"Look, this ex-girlfriend—not even that, ex-one-night-stand is more like it—comes up to us while we're in the middle of lunch and practically shoves her tits in his face while we're _eating_. What was I supposed to do? Wait for him to politely tell her that no thanks, he's not thirsty?"

Tsunuga sighed. "What _did_ you do?"

Goh sat a little taller at that, because despite having become horribly _whipped_ over the past couple of months, he was still _him_ and had his pride. Or something. Tsunuga really didn't get young people these days. Though god willing, he would when Mari got to this age, because she would be _normal._

"Well, I told her exactly who Taki was going home with after lunch, and what we were going to do for dessert," he stated, unwavering. And then, more quietly, "I may have licked his neck."

The older man stared. "And so…how was this not your fault again?"

Goh made a face. "Look, I can't _help_ it if I get a little…edgy whenever one of his little girlfriends comes along, okay? Just…" Goh sighed and waved his hand vaguely in the air, like it was meant to be some sort of gesture that simultaneously encapsulated and dismissed the entire female sex.

Either way, Tsunuga was beginning to get where Goh was going with this. Ah, young love…

"…he's always staring at their tits!!" Goh finished with a dramatically wounded little sniff, sounding supremely dissatisfied.

Or not. The older man cleared his throat a little, having expected something a little less…crude, to be honest. "Oh. Well. To be fair, it was a rather large change he had to adjust to, don't you think? And by staring you mean…"

"I mean, like… more than two seconds. Two seconds I condone, because you know, even _I _notice them for at least two seconds when they're displayed like _that._"Goh sighed and set down the ice pack after a moment, poking gingerly at the swollen flesh around his eye. Some of the bravado deflated out of him. "You think he'd ever miss girls enough to go back?"

Ah, there it was, under all that posturing and cool-guy talk. Good to know that young people these days weren't _so _far removed from his generation. Tsunuga arched an eyebrow. "You think he would go back so easily?"

Goh scowled. "Well of course I wouldn't _let_ him or anything. But I'm just wondering. He could think these things. Plus…he punches me a lot."

"Well, you do grab him a lot. In public."

Goh looked despondent. "What else am I supposed to do when Miss Fake-Double-Ds wanders in when we're on a date! A _date_," he complained, in his defense.

The former detective smiled, and wasn't sure if he was more exasperated or entertained by Goh's rather single-minded plight to mark his territory once and for all. "Well, have you tried talking to him about how that makes you uncomfortable?" He felt like a high school guidance counselor in a bad teen movie or something.

Goh stared at him. "Are you kidding me? That would be so…unlike me. Undignified. Then he'd _definitely _go back to girls. My appeal is in my demanding and rough-but-charming nature, you know. That and stunning good looks, but Taki _clearly_ has no problems messing with that, as you can see."

Tsunuga shook his head. "Look, all I'm saying is I really think the best thing to do in a situation like this is just _tell_ him. Then maybe he won't punch you as much. You know, try and get him to understand how you feel when you see that sort of thing," he finished, just for finishing's sake (because he knew it was in one ear out the other when it came to the younger man currently sitting across from him).

Except Goh actually looked like he was thinking about what Tsunuga had—hard. The older man blinked in surprise. _That_ was a first.

"Get him to understand how I feel, huh?" Goh murmured to himself after a moment, and there was a glint in his eyes that wasn't diminished by the fact that the café owner could only see one of them clearly.

He wasn't positive given the fact that he had no undeniable evidence that would tell him otherwise, but somehow, somehow Tsunuga didn't think the younger man's thoughts were going in _quite_ the direction he'd intended to steer them when he'd spoken his patient words of fatherly advice.

It was just a hunch.

And then Goh grinned, and Tsunuga was pretty sure he had all the evidence he needed right there, intangible or no.

But before he could say anything, the younger man stood, slapping his palms decisively against the counter. "You're absolutely right, boss," Goh declared, and sounded cheerful for the first time since coming into the café. "I just need to get him to understand _exactly_ how I feel." And then, without waiting for a response, he promptly turned around and strolled out the doors with renewed purpose.

Tsunuga stared after him, and thought that he really didn't get kids these days at all.

Offhandedly, the former detective wondered how soon it was going to be before he needed to prep another ice pack.

As it was, it turned out that it was just as soon as expected… if for an entirely unexpected person.

Taki looked vaguely embarrassed as Tsunuga handed him said ice pack some days later, the light-haired man murmuring a quiet, "Thanks," before resting it on his bruised knuckles.

"So…" the café owner began after a moment of just observing the younger man, "you really laid into him this time, didn't you?"

Taki's eyes blazed a little bit at the reminder. "Well he deserved it! Of all the idiotic, immature, _stupid_ things to do!" he seethed, and clenched his other fist like he wanted to punch an imaginary Goh a hundred more times.

Tsunuga was almost afraid to ask. "What did he do?"

The younger man scowled. "I can't believe he would actually think that _flirting with random guys_ would show me how much he loves me. Where the hell would he get a moronic idea like that?!"

Tsunuga swallowed.

Maybe it was because he was of an older, less complicated generation when compared to the likes of Taki and Goh, but Tsunuga considered himself the kind of man who learned his lessons well, and learned them quickly (which probably accounted for his comparatively small lifetime black-eye rate in comparison to Goh's). It was an intelligence that only came with age, perhaps.

And what he'd learned here from these two young men was that maybe—under certain circumstances— silence really was golden.

So when he gave Taki the ice pack and the coffee just as he had done for Goh, this time he decided (wisely) to lay off the advice.

He thought that maybe Goh's face would thank him for the reprieve.

**END**


End file.
